Comment by hathawsh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hathawsh | Hacker News Reader

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I read it differently. It looks like a good outline of 4 basic approaches to building and hosting web sites. I would word them as:

1. Stateless static site. There is a variety of ways to build it (such as React or Svelte or purely by hand) and a variety of ways to host it (such as a directory of HTML files hosted by nginx).

2. Function services like Cloudflare workers, AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions, etc. This is a way to store state without having to manage servers.

3. Single conventional Linux server.

4. Distributed containers.

All web developers should familiarize themselves with these 4 basic approaches and prefer them in approximately the order given. It's good to avoid jumping to distributed containers if you can get away with functions, a single Linux server, or even static HTML. It's also important to move down the list as the app grows rather than reinvent K8s.

I can't have my database on a separate Linux box? Seems odd to insist on either precisely one server or go straight to container orchestration.

That said, I agree with you about the other generalisations!

EDIT: actually, where do PaaSes fit into this taxomony? I'd argue that level 2 is actually the PaaS level. You might choose an edge PaaS (Workers), distributed (Fly.io), or centralised (Elastic Beanstalk) depending on your needs. But ultimately this level is: "I write code, you run it". FaaSes are a subset of PaaS providers which focus on stateless models, but there's no reason you can't combine FaaS for your code with a managed database offering.

I assumed that option 3 was a "Fermi estimation", I. E. "single handed number of servers"

I'm used to 3 tier legacy apps (web / app / dB) but I assumed that would fit into number 3 the best, I could be wrong...

Maybe it's "on the order of a single server", or conveys that the servers are "statically" arranged and/or manually managed rather than automatically (auto scaling, service discovery)?

Yeah, that's a better way to put it. #3 is a static arrangement of a small number of servers.

This is a much better outline of the article than the article's own table of contents. Makes much more sense, even if it's still incredibly narrow in scope.

It's not obvious but you can host an entire website or simple web app on AWS Lambda (as simple as a single function).

I host a full Web app on Lambda like so https://github.com/kaihendry/ltabus

Nice, I host a public chat app off lambda https://sqwok.im

This is much better than the article.

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